Dash & Dot provided for review purposes. I fell in love with these robots all on my own, though.
Friends, today I’m SO excited to show you the toy that I’ve been dreaming about ever since I was a little kid. I want you to meet your kid’s first robot friends, Dash & Dot.
Dash & Dot are from Wonder Workshop, and they are programmable robots that your child can play with and learn coding with all at once. Dash & Dot work with the help of a few different (free) apps you can download from the Wonder Workshop website (they work on phones but I recommend using a tablet so you have more room to play). I’ll go over the apps in a bit more detail briefly, but for now I want to emphasize that Dash & Dot are ready to play pretty much right out of the box. They make adorable little sounds and offer a “hello” greeting when you turn them on, and I can tell you that this “sign of life” from the robots as soon as they came on had my 2 girls hooked and wanting to play. It also earned them instant cuddles. 🙂
Our robots did have to get plugged in immediately, not because they were out of energy, but rather because updates had been made to the program since they had been packaged. I took that as a very good sign, because updates mean improvements!
So to get started with either robot, the app I would choose first is Go. This app gives you a basic feel for some of the fun things each robot can do, like different fun sounds or color changes. I think it’s a great app for younger children and a great warm up app for the older ones.
Path is the app that my kids seem to want to play with constantly, though. In this app, you start to build some programming for your robot through a series of challenges. Dash is perhaps the most fun with this app because Dash is the robot that moves. The challenges seem to build on one another so that the learning continues in the midst of all the fun.
I think one of my favorite moments to witness using this app was when my oldest daughter had to build a program to make Dash take 3 right turns. Once she got it figured out and successfully ran the program, Dash concluded his path by shouting, “All right!” He celebrated her success, and he also made a joke. Darah instantly got it and fell into stitches on the floor. That’s just one example of the truly thoughtful design behind Dash & Dot.
We are still pretty new to Dash & Dot, so we haven’t yet spent much time looking at a third app called Blockly, but my husband checked it out and seems really pumped about it. This app seems geared for an older set (ages 8 and up) and gets even more into the details of programming. It sounds as though you can really start to get your robots to do some more sophisticated actions, which is really cool!
Another thing I’m really loving about Dash & Dot is that this is a toy that my children want to play with together. They don’t always want to play the same things since they are almost 3 years apart in age, but they both love these robots. I think Dash & Dot are actually best when played with in a group setting of some sort, be it with a sibling, a friend or a parent, because as you play more and more, you will get into some problem solving issues, and it’s great to have more than one mind working out a problem together!
The listed ideal age recommendation for Dash & Dot is 5 and up, and I think that’s accurate, unless you have a younger child with an older sibling like we do, and in that case, the younger child can certainly play, too! My little one was drawing paths and running simple programs for Dash on the very first night we had him!
You can purchase Dash and Dot as a combo set for $199.95, or you can order them separately (Dot is $49.99 and Dash is $149.99). Dash is the one that moves about, and I definitely saw the kids playing the most with that robot. But when I asked Darah which robot she liked the best, she said, “Dot!” and I when I asked why she said, “Well you know, Dot can’t move around mom, but that doesn’t stop her from being awesome. She can do really cool stuff!” And right she is. Still, I would highly recommend buying the pair because they are so very much fun together (they give kisses! True story!).